Shin Gallery is pleased to present Floating Between Worlds, an exhibition that contextualizes the young career of Johnny Miller (b. 1962 Newcastle, UK) by placing his works in relation to woodblock prints from Japanese old master Hiroshige (b. 1797 - d. 1858 Tokyo, Japan). On view at 322 Grand Street in New York, the pairing includes selections from Hiroshige's canonical ukiyo-e series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and new charcoal on paper productions from Miller.

While Japonisme and its effects on European art from impressionism through modernism have been fairly well documented, it is far from a stereotypical vision of a foreign land that Johnny Miller and his work reside. Having lived in Osaka for many years following his studies at Kyoto University of Art & Design, Miller's work reflects a nuanced understanding of the spatial, social, and spiritual undercurrents that flows through Japanese print culture, especially its most recognizable iteration, ukiyo-e. The term that translates into pictures of the floating world, ukiyo-e was the method of woodblock printmaking set on capturing daily life in the rapid economic, cultural, and artistic development of 19th century Tokyo (then Edo).

Maybe the most prominent ukiyo-e master, Hiroshige largely broke from the style's traditional preoccupation with genre scenes within the floating world of Edo. Through innovating traditional Japanese printmaking with western perspective techniques and injecting an exceedingly restricted chromatic palate over subdued arrangements of compressed space, Hiroshige's unparalleled attention to the nuances of natural phenomena brilliantly translate a diversity of delicate, transitory moods. Favoring the ephemeral details of landscapes like snow cover, morning dew, and lightfog, the phenomenological world of affect manifest in Hiroshige's prints is as tactile as it is evanescent.

On first view, while Johnny MIller's work may appear to be the total antithesis of the serene surfaces of Hiroshige, the necessarily contextual supplement rests with Ukiyo-e's origin as a mode for profiling the hedonistic life in the burgeoning metropolis of Tokyo, and the term's ability to double to signify Buddhism's earthly plane of death and rebirth. Here, Miller's spatially indeterminate dreamscapes are themselves a sort of floating world of perception, consciousness, and memory, wherein the veneer of fundamental identity traits like masculinity, sexuality, and functionality are contested, inverted, and made threatening.